Before his redundancy Lee Hanson was an international Human Resources Director. Now, in addition to occasional writing and his househusband duties, he works part-time as a Human Resources consultant.

It had been over a year since I had last clocked in. Less than 48 hours earlier the thought of doing this could not have been further from my mind but here I was at 7.30 on a dark, drizzly October morning, working for my living once more...

It all started with a phone call from a friend who worked for an employers' organisation: would I be interested in a few days' work for a member company? The HR manager was off sick for a couple of weeks and some projects could not be delayed. My CV was immediately e-mailed and a meeting with the boss quickly arranged. At a brief meeting with the man who controlled the purse strings, a daily rate was agreed. Start the next day.

Panic would be too strong a word for it, but when you first enter a place where everything is unfamiliar, where every face is that of stranger and you don't even know where the nearest gents' is, the feeling is far from comfortable. Add to this the expectation that you are going to "hit the ground running" and justify your consultant's rate of pay, and it meant that I needed to get my professional act together without delay.

This work was very different from my last head office-based job a hundred miles away from the nearest company factory: this was back to the coalface - a busy manufacturing site, working round the clock. How quickly the new faces become familiar. Names begin to get remembered, job titles and levels in the hierarchy understood, and I was soon making some headway - a lot easier if you are able to avoid those thieves of time commonly known as management meetings.

Within days I was feeling a lot less like an outsider but I had been discovered - I was located in the HR manager's office and was therefore fair game for the "have you got two minutes?" routine. As time went on, I became increasingly drawn into the day-to-day business of a busy HR department.

It has now been more than a year and a half since my "few days' work" started that October morning. The "stressed" HR manager resigned in the December and my period of short-term interim consultancy extended until one day I found myself in a box on the management organisation chart. I had become a fixture and the balance of my time had shifted to a regular HR workload - all to be achieved in my two-day working week. I had long since found out where the gents' was.

In Human Resources, there are many specialities and it is possible to develop different kinds of expertise. After spending so many years in shrinking parts of our manufacturing industry, the field that I gained far too much familiarity with was redundancy. I had more experience than I ever wanted in "downsizing", "rightsizing" or "re-structuring organisations". It all still amounted to people losing their jobs. I also had the insights that come from being on the receiving end of this process on more than one occasion.

Not so long ago, the day came that seems almost inevitable in any business struggling to achieve a profit. We had to reduce costs - and a lot of cost, to quote one of my former colleagues, "comes on two legs". We were to have a fairly substantial redundancy. It is ironic that you are sometimes of greatest value to an organisation when you are called upon to do the parts of the job that you most dislike. Redundancy: the shock, the upset, the waste of years of skills and experience, the personal tragedies and family traumas, not to mention putting it into practice whilst trying to navigate a minefield of employment legislation.

Fortunately for me this time, the business still needed my expertise in our new, slimmer organisation. Two working days each week means that I still do have at least some time on my hands.

On my three "free" days I am still an early bird swimmer, still a regular at the gym, and am still being called upon for my DIY efforts. I am now, however, only allowed a much-diminished role as a cleaner: my wife has gradually reclaimed much of her old territory. I very rarely pick up an iron these days since my wife remains many divisions higher in this particular domestic sport: a Manchester United to my Halesowen Town. She was showing genuine symptoms of domestic chore deprivation when I was doing all the cleaning so it is heartening to see her back to her happy, bossy self. She has also lost none of her "job creation" skills where I am involved. I'd better bring this to an end now; I've got so much to do...